Breakpoint: Whenever same-sex marriage is talked about in the news, we are treated to countless pictures and testimonials of “gay” couples celebrating their new right. However, it’s rare that we hear from another party directly affected by this raging controversy—the children.

The Gospel Coalition: It is odd that simply because of its “sexual freedom” our time should be considered extraordinarily physical. In fact, our “sexual revolution” is mostly an industrial phenomenon, in which the body is used as a idea of pleasure or a pleasure machine with the aim of “freeing” natural pleasure from natural consequence.

First Things: Over the past decade, especially in the struggle over same-sex marriage, some of my friends and allies among social and religious conservatives have called me a defeatist for my culture-war pessimism. I believe that pessimism today is simply realism, and that it is better for us to retreat strategically to a position that we are capable of defending. The cultural battlefield has changed far more than many of us realize.

LA Times: San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone sparked a protest last summer when he ignored pleas from public officials to cancel his plans to march in Washington, D.C., against same-sex marriage.

The Washington Examiner: A comprehensive survey of U.S. Census data finds that the nuclear American family, where both biological parents are at home, is in meltdown, with blacks teens being hit especially hard with less than 2-in-10 15-17-year-olds living with mom and dad.

Religion News Service: The Public Religion Research Institute released polling results on support for same-sex marriage. PRRI’s 2014 American Atlas survey interviewed over 40,000 respondents, enough to give a glimpse into how residents in each state view the legality of same-sex marriage. Not surprisingly, states in the southeast have public opinion opposed to same-sex marriage; the northeast and Pacific coast are most in favor.

Bloomberg: Americans are prepared to accept a U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, pointing to what she described as a sweeping change in attitudes.

Family Studies: February 11, W. Bradford Wilcox testified before the Subcommittee on Human Resources, part of the House Committee on Ways and Means, about how the retreat from marriage contributes to the challenges low-income families face in today’s economy. This is the text of his testimony.

Christian News Network: Officials in Charlotte, North Carolina are considering additional wording for its existing non-discrimination ordinance that would allow men who identify as women and vice versa to have “restroom choice” in public.

First Things: Last week the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints held a rare public press conference. The topic was gay rights. Jonathan Rauch described the event as one in which Mormon leaders “made a startling offer to gay and lesbian America: If you will support reasonable religious-liberty exemptions for us, we will support expanded civil-rights protections for you.”

The Stream: How should we respond if the Supreme Court rules to redefine marriage in June? We respond just as we did when Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973, devoting ourselves all the more to stand for what is right and to be agents of positive change.

The Economist: When marriage is hitched to politics the result is usually muddled thinking. Social conservatives think that lax attitudes to sex, a decline in manliness, short skirts and a hundred other things have chipped away at a sacred institution. The Heritage Foundation, a think-tank with a “Marshall Plan for Marriage”, recently puffed a study suggesting that online pornography was the cause of the rot.

Forbes: The rise of single motherhood is one of the most important socioeconomic phenomena of our time. The percentage of homes headed by a single mother has more than doubled since the 1980s, with single mothers now accounting for 25% of U.S. households.

Family Studies: I discussed in my last blog post, couples marrying today still face a substantial lifetime risk of divorce. Even if the risk drops to around 40 percent, that’s a lot of divorce. However, you are not a statistic, and you can do things that impact your likelihood of lasting love in marriage. In this piece, I focus on those who are not yet married but who want to be in the future. In a future piece, I’ll focus on those already married who are concerned about their risk for divorce.

Mercator Net: Fresh research has just tossed a grenade into the incendiary issue of same-sex parenting. Writing in the British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science, a peer-reviewed journal, American sociologist Paul Sullins concludes that children’s “Emotional problems [are] over twice as prevalent for children with same-sex parents than for children with opposite-sex parents”.

Ethika Politika: The production and the consumption of pornography are human activities. (From here, I’ll refer to production and consumption together as pornographic communication.) Accordingly, pornography, in both its production and consumption, is intentional in structure—that is, what identifies pornographic production and consumption is the intent of the parties involved in that production and consumption. So in an effort to identify what is pornographic or non-pornographic, it isn’t enough to delineate or envision a collection of physical behaviors that is “off-limits.”

GetReligion: Rod’s reader, essentially, parses the Times report from the newspaper’s troops on the ground in Alabama, stating that they appear to be going out of their way to avoid contact with anyone who disagrees with them on the legal issues at hand. Along the way, “Irenist” proclaims “Kellerism!” several times.

Doug Wilson: Look. Racial bigotry is a sin. Sexual perversion is a sin. The fact that the respective players in these two battles were and are Alabama and the Federal Government is completely beside the point. Those who glibly point to that as though it settles everything are like those who think that a son who once participated in an intervention over his mother’s alcoholism has thereby earned the right, twenty years later, to pressure her into committing tax fraud. No, no. Let’s go over this carefully. Drunkenness is a sin. Fraud is a sin. They are both sins. Whoever is championing the sin is the sinner.

Mere Orthodoxy: To give but one example, I am on record suggesting that Christians ought to respond to the charge of “bigotry” for our views on sexual morality with a hearty laugh and a, “Oh, if you only knew!”

National Law Journal (Access via Google): Setting up a clash between state and federal courts in Alabama, same-sex marriage advocates are fighting in federal district court to force a county judge to issue marriage licenses.

Public Discourse: Published research employing the New Family Structures Study (NFSS), the ECLS (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study), the US Census (ACS), the Canadian Census, and now the NHIS all reveal a comparable basic narrative, namely, that children who grow up with a married mother and father fare best.

The New York Post: In a survey of couples married less than 10 years, he found that men who lived with their wives before marriage “rated themselves considerably lower in dedication” — what Stanley refers to as their “intrinsic motivation to be with this person.”

Family Studies: Those who worry about Americans’ declining likelihood of being married are often reminded that plenty of single people are merely delaying marriage, not deliberately avoiding it altogether.

National Review: The Supreme Court has issued an order denying the state of Alabama’s request for a stay of the federal-court order barring Alabama from enforcing its laws defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Justice Thomas’s dissent, joined by Justice Scalia, cogently explains why the Court’s denial of the stay is grossly irresponsible.

The Washington Post: The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Monday to allow same-sex marriages to proceed in Alabama was an “indecorous” move that seems to pre-ordain the court’s decision later this year on whether the Constitution provides a right for such marriages, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in dissent.

Campus Reform: Marquette University has moved to fire a tenured conservative professor after he published a blog post about a graduate student instructor’s remarks to a student about same-sex marriage.

SCOTUS Blog: With the Supreme Court again refusing to delay lower courts’ rulings in favor of same-sex marriage, Alabama on Monday morning became the thirty-seventh state where such unions are legal, and at least four couples were promptly wed at a courthouse in Montgomery. Alabama’s situation, though, is unique because of a looming legal battle over who will or will not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

The New York Times: The age-old lesson about marriage that has been communicated by parents everywhere (two are stronger than one) is now brushing up against a 21st-century reality: The percentage of married households in the United States has fallen to a historic low.

National Law Journal (Access via Google): “This acquiescence may well be seen as a signal of the court’s intended resolution of that question,” Thomas wrote. “This is not the proper way to discharge our Article III responsibilities. And, it is indecorous for this court to pretend that it is.”

Public Discourse: We should make public policy and encourage social norms that reflect the truth about the human person and sexuality, not obfuscate the truth about such matters and sow the seeds of sexual confusion in future generations for years to come.

The Daily Signal: Is Obama’s new federally-funded infrastructure package the key to strengthening our nation’s families? That’s the argument of W. Bradford Wilcox of the American Enterprise Institute and Robert Lehrman of the Urban Institute in their essay “How to Revive the American Dream in Blue-Collar America.”

Item Live: Lynn Public Schools and Gordon College have collaborated for the last 11 years, with several college students serving as student teachers each semester. Lindsay said that volunteering is also a major part of the college’s focus, particularly in a student’s first year. In last year’s freshman class, half of the students volunteered 14,000 hours doing after-school tutoring and working with church and youth group organizations in various area communities, Lindsay said.

The Christian Post: Just when you thought Rev. Danny Cortez would be busy avoiding controversy after he and his congregation were dismissed by the Southern Baptist Convention in 2014 for adopting a “third way” affirming same-sex unions, he has landed himself in hot water again.

The Christian Post: The bill entitled “Magistrates Recusal of Civil Ceremonies” was introduced last Wednesday by the state’s Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger and is currently co-sponsored by 16 other senators. If passed, the bill will allow county magistrates and register of deeds employees to recuse themselves from performing all duties related to marriage ceremonies for at least six months due to religious objections.

Associated Press: Roughly half the country also thinks local officials and judges with religious objections ought to be exempt from any requirement that they issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, according to the poll.

Real Clear Markets: When it comes to marriage, the nation is increasingly divided. Among college-educated Americans the news about marriage is surprisingly good: divorce is down, nonmarital childbearing is rare, and the vast majority of children are raised in stable, married homes. But for Americans without college degrees, the news is sobering: divorce is high, nonmarital childbearing has never been higher, and about half of children will see their parents’ marriage or relationship break down and spend a portion of their lives in a home headed by a single parent.

The Oregonian: An administrative law judge has rejected an attempt by lawyers representing the owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa to dismiss the case and award them $200,000 for damages, court costs and attorney fees.

Alabama’s 13: “I am disappointed in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court’s decision not to stay the federal district court’s ruling. The confusion that has been created by the District Court’s ruling could linger for months until the U.S. Supreme Court resolves this issue once and for all,” said Attorney General Luther Strange.

Reuters: Sweet Cakes by Melissa, in the Portland area, might have to pay fines of $75,000 or more to two women to whom it refused service in 2013, a Bureau of Labor and Industries administrative judge ruled last week. A hearing to determine the damages is set for March 10.

Public Discourse: The Christian gospel offers a third possibility to parents whose children are struggling with their sexuality—as it does to all people. Christianity, while never promising complete liberation from one’s battles with sin, liberates individuals to experience their truest self, as made in the image of God. The gospel also promises unending love toward the other.

Summit Ministries:“If we redefine marriage to include same-sex couples,” the argument so often heard in the early 2000s went, “then soon we will be accepting group sex, pedophilia, incest, etc.” Proponents of same-sex “marriage” had little tolerance for this argument, labeling it “scare tactics” and those who made it “homophobic.”

Los Angeles Times: A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down an effort to delay same-sex marriages in Alabama, clearing the way for gay and lesbian couples to wed next week, though a last-minute appeal could create additional delays.

Newsmax: An Oregon bakery that refused on religious grounds to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple violated the state’s anti-discrimination laws because the shop is not a registered religious institution, state officials said on Monday.

Bloomberg: President Barack Obama’s $4 trillion budget proposal includes a major change to the Social Security Act that would allow same-sex couples to receive spousal benefits even if they live in states that don’t recognize such unions.

The Gospel Coalition: Our society has struggled the past few years to come to a meaningful consensus on the nature and limits of marriage. While the Supreme Court’s decisions this coming June on four new caseswill clarify the legal status of the institution, the only thing everyone agrees on is that the public dispute will carry on.

Religion Clause: As previously reported, last year a Mennonite couple filed suit against the Iowa Civil Rights Commission to prevent it from moving ahead on a complaint that the couple refused to host a same-sex wedding ceremony in their art gallery in violation of the ban on discrimination in public accommodations.

Public Discourse: I write because I am one of many children with gay parents who believe we should protect marriage. I believe you were right when, during the Proposition 8 deliberations, you said “the voice of those children [of same-sex parents] is important.” I’d like to explain why I think redefining marriage would actually serve to strip these children of their most fundamental rights.

National Review: In a short essay for SCOTUSblog, Yale law professor William Eskridge, an early architect of the constitutional attack on state marriage laws, presents his newfound claim that state laws that define marriage as the union of a man and a woman violate the “original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.” I think that Eskridge’s claim is wildly implausible, indeed preposterous.

WRAL (AP): Lawyers on both sides of a same-sex marriage case urged Louisiana’s Supreme Court on Thursday to rule soon on the matter even though the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to do so by late June.

Crux: With news that Mormons will support laws that prohibit housing and job discrimination against LGBT people in exchange for greater religious liberty protections, the Catholic Church finds itself allied with just one other mainstream Christian denomination — the Southern Baptist Convention — in opposing work and housing protections for gays and lesbians.

ERLC: In every age and culture there are certain habits of sinful behavior that are particularly common and overwhelmingly destructive. In modern Western cultures one of the most soul-destroying habits is consumption of pornography, which leads us to commit adultery in our hearts. (Matthew 5:28).

Reuters: “I am dismayed by those judges in our state who have stated they will recognize and unilaterally enforce a federal court decision which does not bind them,” Moore wrote. “I would advise them that the issuance of such licenses would be in defiance of the laws and constitution of Alabama.”

BP News: In the wake of an interfaith Vatican conference on marriage two months ago, a coalition of Roman Catholics and evangelicals — including Southern Baptist Timothy George — has issued a statement calling the legalization of same-sex marriage “a graver threat” to society than either “easy acceptance of divorce” or “widespread cohabitation.”

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ADF Media: Alliance Defending Freedom asked the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit Monday to hear the case of Pennsylvania’s Geneva College, which is challenging a three-judge panel’s ruling that would force the Christian school to provide access to abortion pills as required by an Obama administration mandate.

Christian Examiner: Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Kristen Waggoner, who represented Stutzman, said the judgment is just the “first punch,” financially. She expressed concerns that the ACLU, which is representing Ingersoll and Freed, will attempt to “financially devastate” Stutzman’s business and personal assets — including her retirement and personal savings.

PJ Media: Lawyers for the Alliance Defending Freedom argued that excluding worship services from “a broadly available public forum” discriminates against religion. The church, which has outgrown its own building, needs more space for special occasions and the nearby public school is the only place large enough that they can afford.